Guiding the Growth of a Conductive Filament by Nanoindentation To Improve Resistive Switching

Redox-based memristor devices, which are considered to have promising nonvolatile memory, mainly operate through the formation/rupture of nanoscale conductive filaments. However, the random growth of conductive filaments is an obstacle for the stability of memory devices and the cell-to-cell uniformity. Here, we investigate the guiding effect of nanoindentation on the growth of conductive filaments in resistive memory devices. The nanoindented top electrodes generate an electric field concentration and the resultant precise control of a conductive filament in two typical memory devices, Ag/SiO2/Pt and W/Ta2O5/Pt. The nanoindented cells possess a much larger ON/OFF ratio, a sharper RESET process, a higher response speed, and better cell-to-cell uniformity compared with the conventional cells. Our finding reflects that the use of large-scale nanotransfer printing might be a unique way to improve the performance of resistive random access memory.